Government launches new stay safe campaign without the domain name, Victoria, Australia – Have launched a new campaign for their registration plate system which is “stay alert, stay alive”.

Within days of this being launched a critic of the new campaign registered the domain name stayalertstayalive.com.au – The .com is already owned by Strathclyde Police in Scotland and the cctld for australia is .com.au which is most commonly used – The registrants of the domain points it to another site he operates which is www.camerascutcrashes.com.au – It’s a simple site designed on wordpress.

“Whoops, looks like the GovInc ‘forgot’ to register the main domain for the spanking new number plate slogan,” Mr Goldburg writes.

“Surely to complete the message, they should have obtained the domain names for the PR campaign they are trying to thrust in front of us every day on the road.”

The website then goes on to question how much was spent to come up with the “ground-breaking slogan”, or what proportion of motorbike registration fees was spent to “choose the regular blue on the plate”.

“Teds [sic] come out with a fine statement to justify his decision but no mention of slashing TAFE education, let alone promoting ANY driver education courses,” the website says.

It concludes: “Hopefully we can keep the roadtoll down (and not just have to quietly remove random figures from the published toll).”

He phoned radio station 3AW’s rumour file today anonymously to promote the website.

Asked if he knew who had set up the website, he said: “Hang on I’ll just have a look in the mirror.”

Mr Goldburg registered the domain name yesterday, and it wasn’t the first time he had got up to such digital mischief.

Previously he has registered the domain names of the other Victorian road campaigns – Cameras Cut Crashes and Cameras Save Lives. All three now re-direct to www.camerascutcrashes.com.au

As a cyclist and motorist in Melbourne, Mr Goldburg said he wanted action and solid policies to change road users’ behaviour, rather than just more words.

‘‘[The new number plates are] not actually doing anything about road safety, it’s just a slogan. It would be better as a marketing slogan than it would be as a road safety message,’’ Mr Goldburg said.

In the past Mr Goldburg has actively campaigned about raising awareness of the location of speed cameras.

‘‘At the moment all you get is a hidden camera and you aren’t told that there’s a camera there because it’s a black spot. You only get a fine in the mail weeks later and find out you’ve driven through a blackspot,’’ he said.

‘‘It’s just awareness that people are beyond the ‘It’s good for you, it’s not revenue raising’ message.’’

Mr Goldburg said he made no money from the site, but had received about 4500 hits today.

While the government has its own domain (vic.gov.au), many VicRoads road campaign names in the past also have a matching .com.au domain which redirects to the official VicRoads website.